Category Archives: Daily Telegraph

My recollection is the only times I have read the Daily Telegraphsystematically was during the Great Profumo crisis. I’d extend that to the the trial of Stephen Ward for “procuring”, and the subsequent Denning Inquiry.

At this distance my post-adolescent salacious interest was the Telegraph had more detail than other London sources available in Dublin. There was a patient expectation to see when the Irish censors would step in. Yet, this was about when the Dublin evenings could have boards on the lines of:

Car crash at Naas
Nine Dead
Horrific scenes
FULL PICTURES

— so the censorship board was definitely loosening up.

Yogi Berra, as ever

Today It’s déjà vu all over again. The most surprising thing there being the lad from St Louis, MO, accentuating his — pardon me! — French so expertly.

John Profumo, the Conservative minister who resigned over an infamous 1960s sex scandal, had previously had a long-running relationship with a glamorous Nazi spy who may have tried to blackmail him, newly released MI5 files reveal.

Gisela Winegard, a German-born fashion and photographer’s model, met Profumo in Oxford in 1936 when he was an undergraduate and kept in contact with him for at least 20 years during which time she ran a Nazi secret information service in occupied Paris, had a child with a high-ranking German officer, and was imprisoned for espionage on the liberation of Paris in 1944.

At the height of the 1963 sex scandal when Profumo was forced to resign after misleading the House of Commons about his brief affair with Christine Keeler, MI6 sent MI5 a letter and files detailing the Tory minister’s connection with Winegard (née Gisela Klein).

“Although it is not particularly relevant to the current notorious case, Geoffrey thought you might like to have for your files the attached copy of a report for our representative (redacted) dated 2nd October 1950, which makes mention of an association between Gisela Klein and Profumo which began ca. 1933 and had apparently not ceased at the time of this report,” wrote the MI6 officer Cyril Mackay to MI5’s head of investigations, Arthur Martin.

Not exactly a knee-trembler, but — as always, the cover-up is more deadly than the original fart:

The security services historian Christopher Andrew, commenting on the release of the files at the national archives, said: “Had the media been aware of the contents of the MI5 file in the current release, the conspiracy theories would have been even more extravagant.”

Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!

Professor (Emeritus) Andrew is under-rating the extravagance of conspiracy theories (with any number of names) spun in bar-rooms at the time. Nor did the “extravagance” lack foundations — though the commoners were not allowed to know anything beyond Denning’s whitewash.

The end of the trial and Ward’s dramatic suicide swept the Profumo scandal off the British scene. It was as if one moment the newspapers had been full of only that and the next moment there was nothing.

There had already been some tidying up of loose ends. Over the weekend of 27/28 July a well-dressed man had walked into the Bloomsbury art gallery which was selling Ward’s drawings. (It sold 123 for a total of £11,517, which at that time meant Ward would have been financially quite comfortable).

You better believe it. Ward had a speciality in “advanced” drawings of the social élite and the lady-friends of the rich-and-famous. Against his posthumous £11k+, I left TCD a couple of years later looking for an annual whack of £800. Back on the main drag:

The man selected every drawing of the Royal Family on show — including those of Prince Philip, Princess Margaret, the Duchess of Gloucester and the Duke of Kent — declined to give his name, paid with a bank draft for £5,000 and took the drawings away immediately.

The Lady in my Life and myself are there, dead in front of the microphones, and about four rows back. The last time I went was mid-1960s, and the main speaker was Harold Wilson. There were still coal-mines working then. Durham’s very last was Monkwearmouth, where the last shift was worked on 10th December 1993. The site, today, is the Stadium of Light, Sunderland’s home ground.

Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal, directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed; if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of revolution the miner must go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as much as reaction needs coal. Whatever may be happening on the surface, the hacking and shovelling have got to continue without a pause, or at any rate without pausing for more than a few weeks at the most. In order that Hitler may march the goose-step, that the Pope may denounce Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lords, that the poets may scratch one another’s backs, coal has got to be forthcoming. But on the whole we are not aware of it; we all know that we ‘must have coal’, but we seldom or never remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental-effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. It is just ‘coal’ — something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have to pay for it. You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower.

It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are now. There are still living a few very old women who in their youth have worked underground, with the harness round their waists, and a chain that passed between their legs, crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were pregnant. And even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of coal.

There have been no active coal-mines, and no coal-miners in the County Palatine this quarter-century. But the Durham Miners’ Gala, the Big Meetin’, goes on, and this year was bigger and brassier than ever.

Durham has too much history for its own good. That’s an expression I have seen applied to Ireland, to the island of Cyprus and to Naples in recent times. It has degrees of truth in every case. In Durham, though, the history is close enough to touch:

… the miners who died in the many pit disasters of the Durham coalfields.

They number thousands, including 164 at Seaham in 1880 and 168 at Stanley in 1909, and are commemorated by a memorial in Durham Cathedral, a spectacular Romanesque landmark that this autumn celebrates the 25th anniversary of its designation as a Unesco World Heritage Site, along with the rest of the historic city. Next to the memorial to the victims of pit disasters is a book of remembrance that the Dean of the Cathedral, the Very Reverend Michael Sadgrove, was at pains to point out to me. “Here’s one 15 years of age,” he said. “J E Scott. Died at Shotton [in 1953]. This is a really poignant place.”

The Dean talked of “the big meeting”, the annual miners’ gala in July when the former mining communities pour through the city behind their colliery banners and wind their way up to the cathedral for the miners’ service. “It’s a kind of echo of the Middle Ages when people would flock into this place and believe they were part of something bigger than they were,” said the Dean.

Any rail journey takes one past acres of rough scrub that not too long ago were coal-tips. Railway yards and sidings stretch far, far further than any conceivable modern need. Few villages lack what once was (and may still be marked as) the Miners’ Welfare hall. In the streets and pubs one brushes past ageing faces and limbs, marked with the blue of coal-dust tattooed under the skin.

Scott and Scot

Yesterday, then, to Durham’s Racecourse. The site stretches past the Wear river-bank, and to its other side the massive ridge (as above):

Well yet I love thy mix’d and massive piles, Half church of God, half castle ’gainst the Scot …

For sixty-odd years that tag has come to my mind, and mouth, every time I have seen an image or the reality of Durham’s great, looming cathedral. I somehow knew it was Walter Scott. That may be because anything so romantic had to derive from the same source that gave us swash-and-buckle, the Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood and even Tony Curtis’s fictional “Yonda lies the castle of my fodder“. Precisely locating the reference isn’t quite that easy. To save others the sweat, it is found in Canto Third of Harold the Dauntless of 1817.

For contemporary tastes, Scott’s romantic world contains too much “hied me home” or

Wrinkled his brows grew, and hoary his hair

That’s unfair in this case, because the 1817 poem is prefaced by a more-cynical Scott. He deplores O tempora! O mores, as Cicero did Against Catiline: —

Ennui! — or, as our mothers call’d thee, Spleen! To thee we owe full many a rare device; Thine is the sheaf of painted cards, I ween, The rolling billiard-ball, the rattling dice, The turning-lathe for framing gimcrack nice; The amateur’s blotch’d pallet thou mayst claim, Retort, and air-pump, threatening frogs and mice, (Murders disguised by philosophic name,) And much of trifling grave, and much of buxom game.

At the moment, the imposing central tower of the Cathedral Church of Christ, Blessed Mary the Virgin and St Cuthbert of Durham has scaffolding all round, and wears a square white cook’s bonnet.

The proceedings

When we finally came to the speechifying, even that have to be after a brass-band rendering of “The Miner’s Hymn”, Gresford:

Written by a former miner, Robert Saint, to commemorate the Gresford pit disaster in 1934 it has been played at mining events ever since; most notably at the famous Durham Miners’ Gala.

What is too easily forgotten is that, in the days of working pits, the attendees at the Gala would have held silence to that every year and recalled the death-toll.

My first teaching job was in a boys’ grammar school in the County Durham. Male teachers in an all-male (with one brave exception) staff-room constitute a cynical lot. So, morning break, 21st October 1966, was eerily quiet. The news was coming through of the Aberfan disaster and the immolation of Pantglas Primary school. By no coincidence, Alan Plater’s Close the Coalhouse Door (originally intended as a BBC radio play) went on stage in April 1968:

It’s the same tradition as Abide With Me before the Cup Final. It’s very much the mood of “those no longer with us”. But for industrial workers, especially in the heaviest industries, it’s also “those taken from us because of managerial mistakes and incompetence”.

There is a message here; and it’s the box that most of the speakers at the Big Meeting ticked.

Disasters like Gresford in 1934, Aberfan in 1966 and the Grenfell Tower this year are “accidents-waiting-to-happen”. They derive from decisions taken, or studiously ignored, by bureaucratic processes beyond the control of us ordinary folk. What we have to protect us, to some extent, are Health and Safety Regulations. That is, of course, if they are policed and enforced.

At some stage in your 30s, the disruptive voice in your head started clanging pans and yelling THEY’RE MAKING IT UP!

Which yell — D’oh! — is surely the whole point of “fiction”.

So here am I, just finished Philip Kerr, and well into Donna Leon. Bubbling on the back hob is Walter Scott (yes: I can double-task. And still drink wine at the same time). Looking forward to Alan Furst next month. And Ben Aaronovitch a month later. Any gaps will be glossed over by visits to Waterstone’s and similar joints. Failing that, there’s a dozen metres or so of shelving here to be revisited. And one day — I promise — I’ll live long enough to get through Moby Dick.

I used to ascribe it to Hilaire Belloc, because I have a liking for Belloc’s epigrams. It was, in fact Humbert Wolff, a civil servant with the Ministry of Labour, a translator and writer.

You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

Good Friday

Which leads us to this extraordinary business when a secret document, presumably via the Foreign Office (prop: the Rt Hon Philip Hammond, as in very Right and oh-so-honourable), finds its way to the Daily Telegraph.

The Daily Telegraph has seen the official British Government memorandum which includes details of a private meeting between Miss Sturgeon and Sylvie Bermann, the French Ambassador to the UK.

The memorandum which was written by a senior British civil servant, dated March 6th, states: “Just had a telephone conversation with Pierre-Alain Coffinier (PAC), the French CG [consul-general]. He was keen to fill me in on some of the conversations his Ambassador had during her visit to Scotland last week. All of this was given on a confidential basis.”

It continues: “The Ambassador….had a truncated meeting with the FM [Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister] (FM running late after a busy Thursday…). Discussion appears to have focused mainly on the political situation, with the FM stating that she wouldn’t want a formal coalition with Labour; that the SNP would almost certainly have a large number of seats… that she’d rather see David Cameron remain as PM (and didn’t see Ed Miliband as PM material).”

The thought has to be “just too convenient”. Note the incriminating fingerprints:

the Torygraph has “seen” the document;

it is then a “leak” of a memo of a telephone conversation and all at third hand — Bermann☞Coffinier☞unnamed UK official;

the information was “on a confidential basis”, so its revelation is an embarrassment to both national governments;

rashly, an adverb one might not ever readily apply to Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister got personal, down and dirty;

the document emerges late on a Friday, a Bank Holiday Friday, when government officials have departed for a long weekend. Fridays play quite a rôle in what follows.

And we can, of course, trust the Torygraph?

Well, let’s consider how George Galloway was stitched up. You’ll find the term “forgery” twenty-one times in that account. It’s a long read, so I’ll leave you to enjoy. One thought before we swiftly pass on: even were the document no forgery, there remains the further oddities of how the Torygraph got it, and used it with malevolent intent. We need not speculate on why. And, in the present case, we have confirmation: And the Daily Mail is an impeccable source?A bit self-regarding, don’tcha think, of the Mail to harken back to 1924 — for, ahem, there is the small matter of the Zinoviev letter, presumably concocted by White Russians, and deployed by the Tory Party at a convenient moment in the 1924 General Election. And published by … the Daily Mail. I like this one because it has a parallel existence to the Sturgeon canard. The language that Gregor Zinoviev uses (27 October 1924) almost echoes Sturgeon’s denial. Compare and contrast:

The letter of 15th September, 1924, which has been attributed to me, is from the first to the last word, a forgery. … The forger has shown himself to be very stupid in his choice of the date. On the 15th of September, 1924, I was taking a holiday in Kislovodsk, and, therefore, could not have signed any official letter.

Friday, bloody Friday

The exchange between Coffinier and the unnamed British official took place on a Friday (a French official at his desk on a Friday?) Sturgeon sent a public tweet:

… to the Telegraph’s Scottish political correspondent Simon Johnson read: “.@simon_telegraph your story is categorically, 100%, untrue…which I’d have told you if you’d asked me at any point today.”

Johnson didn’t reply to the First Minister.

The French Embassy has since backed up Sturgeon’s version of events in a statement.

It read: “While the ambassador and the First Minister, some time ago, have discussed the political situation, Ms Sturgeon did not touch on her personal political preferences with regards the future Prime minister.”

Which has more of the “look-and-feel” of the canny Scots lawyer we know Sturgeon to be.

The Tory game-play here mirrors the Zinoviev letter: then the target was the wavering third-party Liberals, now it’s the third-party SNP.

Nicola Sturgeon has demanded a civil service inquiry into the leaking of a memo which claimed she privately wanted to see Conservatives remain in power following the May 7 General Election.

The Scottish National Party leader described the allegation as “100% untrue” and said she had written to Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood to demand a Whitehall probe into how the account of her conversation with the French ambassador was obtained by the Daily Telegraph.

She said the story was a sign of “panic” in Westminster over the surge in support for the SNP, and issued a challenge to Labour leader Ed Miliband to state publicly that he would work with the SNP to “lock out” David Cameron from Downing Street in the event of a hung parliament.

Only around the tenth to twelfth paragraph, even in this “updated” version, do we get to the caveats and Nicola Sturgeon’s firm denial. Odd, that.

One was a primary-school headteacher who attempted to illustrate size by painting a million dots on the playground tarmac. It had to be done by putting tens into blocks of hundreds, hundreds into thousands … The result was a surface suffering from acute, multi-coloured chickenpox, and achieving total incomprehensibility.

At the other end (and here I’m dredging my memory, so E&OE), Konrad Lorenz did a thing with ducks. He successively removed ducklings from the mother duck. The mother became distressed only when the last-but-two duckling was offed. Lorenz concluded that ducks count “One, two, many …”

The third was my own attempt to get students to appreciate the limits of their imaginations.

“Close your eyes. Imagine — say a milk-bottle on the doorstep.” [Gosh! That dates me. When did one last see that domestic detail?]

My own conceptualising ran out at seven. Then I had to “see” two rows of four … Either my persuasion was so good, or that’s about the natural limits. Very few students claimed to be able to produce a clear picture of more than seven.

Holocaust

Here’s another example of our intellect being betrayed by number.

The Greek word means “consumed by fire”. At some point it was transformed into mass-sacrifice, and therefore into its modern usage. That may date from Tyndale’s Bible of 1526:

… to love a mans neghbour as him silfe ys a greater thynge then all holocaustes and sacrifises. [Mark’s Gospel, 12.33]

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.

Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes or in their offices: secretaries, business men and women, military and federal workers, moms and dads, friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.

The Navy and Marine Corps suffered a total of 2,896 casualties of which 2,117 were deaths (Navy 2,008, Marines 109) and 779 wounded (Navy 710, Marines 69). The Army (as of midnight, 10 December) lost 228 killed or died of wounds, 113 seriously wounded and 346 slightly wounded. In addition, at least 57 civilians were killed and nearly as many seriously injured.

And

The September 11 attacks resulted in 2,996 immediate (attack time) deaths: 2,977 victims and the 19 hijackers. A total of 372 people with non-U.S. citizenship (excluding the 19 perpetrators) perished in the attacks, representing just over 12% of the total. The immediate deaths include 246 victims on the four planes (from which there were no survivors), 2,606 in New York City in the World Trade Center and on the ground, and 125 at the Pentagon.About 292 people were killed at street level by burning debris and falling bodies of those who had jumped or fallen from the World Trade Center’s windows. All the deaths in the attacks were civilians except for 55 military personnel killed at the Pentagon. Some immediate victims were not added to the list until years later.

I seriously doubt that many of us carry cold statistics, like those, in our heads. We round the numbers at best, or focus on the odd one or two victims known to us.

So those 888,246 ceramic poppies I saw planted in the Tower of London moat come down to a single grave, my grandfather’s, at Doullens Communal Cemetery Ext No 2. The toll of the Second World War subjectively amounts to cousin Jean Chapman, among the other ATS girls of 121 Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery, taken out by a sneak bomber at the Imperial Hotel, Great Yarmouth, in 1943.

Je suis Charlie

What I’m attempting to do here is comprehend the upsurge of popular emotion over the Rue Nicolas Appert murders.

I do not believe it is for some abstract: the “Freedom” featured by the Times, the Telegraph and Daily Mail headline screamers:

By comparison, and by far, the most effective, human, front page today was that “Up yours!” of the Independent:

It may also be the very name of the magazine: again, not an abstraction but a comfortable prénom.

Twelve, the number of the dead, is one of those iconic numbers, enough for a small circle of acquaintance. It is the complement of the minibus on the way to the football, the population of a typical office, the moment when an empty bar or café starts to feel it is filling up, when we look around and feel we may have chosen the right restaurant after all. It is an understandable, embraceable, personifiable group.

It’s a well-endorsed truth that all the things that come closest to us use good Anglisch. Those Norman-French and other imports are only for the poncy stuff. So the root here is angr– and that’s rooted deep in Old Norse and elsewhere.

It’s often a good thing. It get things done. It narrows one’s options, and focuses the mind marvellously on what matters. Anger in others tells us as much of their character as we need to know.

An example?

Despite the gloss the schoolmen try to put on him, Shakespeare’s Henry V is a bastard. Not genetically, but psychologically. Shakespeare keeps giving us hints (and the presentation of Hank Cinq stems directly from twisted Prince Hal). Consider the way Henry plays with the conspirators in Act II, scene ii; his cruel joke on the common soldier, Williams, in the fourth Act; his cynical wooing of Katharine. And this:

I was not angry since I came to France Until this instant. Take a trumpet, herald; Ride thou unto the horsemen on yon hill: If they will fight with us, bid them come down,Or void the field; they do offend our sight: If they’ll do neither, we will come to them, And make them skirr away, as swift as stones Enforced from the old Assyrian slings: Besides, we’ll cut the throats of those we have, And not a man of them that we shall take Shall taste our mercy. Go and tell them so.

No way can that be delivered with bombast.

So, to my own cold anger

It stems from the coincidence of two horror stories — one of the present, one implied for the future — i9n today’s press.

Hospital A&E units recorded their worst ever performance in the week before Christmas as NHS emergency care services struggled to deal with an unprecedented number of patients arriving, new figures released today show.

What the NHS calls type 1 A&Es, emergency departments based at hospitals in England, treated and either admitted or discharged just 83.1% of arrivals within the politically important four-hour target in the week ending Sunday 21 December.

The NHS Constitution says that 95% of patients should be dealt with within that four-hour timeframe, a deadline ministers have promised to meet.

The 83.1% is the lowest performance against the target since records began in 2004. It came in the week that emergency departments faced a new record high number of A&E patients – 289,530.

Lay aside the macro-economic Big Issue, the Elephant-in-the-room, or (to deploy the ultimate cliché) David Cameron’s repetitious tripe about his long-term economic plan for hard-working families. Get this, folks: the “plan” extends all the way to Election Day on May 7th — after that you and your family are on their own.

What’s left is what has made Britain tick this last seventy years: Nye’s Health Service, free at the point of need from cradle to grave, and Rab Butler’s flawed-but-visionary education system, which delivered the shift from a predominantly working-class population to the bourgeoisification of suburban Britain.

Both are now being dismembered by the toff-class. As Kevin Maguire (I trust, in anger) declares:

Conclusion:

Can the stupid party be this stupid?

The anger that attacks on the NHS and education can generate are just what is needed to motivate Labour grass-roots members to tramp streets, knock on doors, stuff envelopes, work on phone-banks. And the Tories (and their LibDem co-conspirators) are stoking up just that. They do offend our sight And not a man of them… Shall taste our mercy.

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.

And certainly never in opinion polls.

However, is it time to muse on whether something is actually happening?

For months there has been stasis the numerology — which may be why the gurus expiate on the UKIP figures. Now, look at this:

I was wary when Stephen Bush took over the Telegraph Morning Briefing. He has proved to be witty, original and perceptive. His adaptation of the running item on opinion polls left me cold, particularly as the line-charts never seemed to do any thing (which, since it’s a running average, is actually quite convincing). And no, over the last few days, signs of movement. Odd? How long before the Mrs Tweedys of the Press realise that “the chickens are oop to summut”?